Mendocino, California, Held Hostage by EMF Quacks
Wired News ran a report this week about the sad state of affairs in Mendocino, California, where a small group of individuals opposed to all wireless technology has been extremely successful in imposing its views on the small town.
The group is led by Arthur Firstenberg who maintains that he is “electrically sensitive.” Firstenberg claims that wireless radio signals are responsible for everything from irritability up to and including cancer. Firstenberg moved to Mendocino to escape the radio waves in New York City he thinks were harming him, and has attracted other people who believe that radio waves are harming them to move to Mendocino.
Firstenberg is president of the national Cellular Task Force and a member of Wireless Free Mendocino, which attempts to keep wireless services out of Mendocino. That group has already been successful at blocking construction of a cellular phone tower and a wireless broadband Internet initiative. It has now set its sights on the local high school radio station.
When the Mendocino Community Network wanted to offer broadband wireless Internet service, Wireless Free Mendocino showed up at public forums (including, according to Wired News one woman who was wearing protective headgear to protect herself from radio signals) to denounce the plan as dangerous.
Wired News sites former English teacher Christy Wagner who insists that a wireless transmitter installed on the roof of her school cause herself and her students to become “irritable and easily distracted” (imagine high school students being easily distracted! Must have been the wireless transmitter. Wagner eventually took medical leave and insists the transmitter ruined her life,
This overexposure to pulsed microwaves has been a personal tragedy for me. I’m left hypersensitive — even my mouse burns my hand when I use my computer now.
Or as, Scott Southard, who manages the radio station the anti-wireless group wants to destroy, puts it, “There have been radio towers on the high school for 30 years and there were never complaints about them until Firstenberg started his campaign of misinformation and fear. You can’t argue with zealots.”
Source:
Mendocino, CA: Microwave Hot Seat. Julia Scheeres, Wired News, January 22, 2002.
Tags: EMF